Ukraine putting pressure on fighting-age men outside country

KYIV, Ukraine — Even as Ukraine works to get much-needed arms from a huge U.S. aid package to the front line, its government is seeking to reverse the drain of its potential soldiers, announcing that men of conscription age will no longer be able to renew passports from outside Ukraine.

The Cabinet of Ministers said late Wednesday that men between 18 and 60 years old who are deemed fit for military service will only be able to replace their passports inside Ukraine.

Millions of Ukrainians have fled the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, mostly to neighboring European countries. The European Union’s statistics agency, Eurostat, says 4.3 million Ukrainians are living in EU countries, 860,000 of them men 18 years of age or older.

The move has met with some criticism inside Ukraine. Opposition lawmaker Ivanna Klympush-Tsyntsadze, who heads the Parliamentary Committee for Ukraine’s European Integration, said denying military-age men access to consular services could lead to “well-founded” legal challenges at the European Court of Human Rights.

Russia’s population of almost 150 million dwarfs Ukraine’s 38 million, and Moscow can draw on a much bigger army. Earlier this month, Ukraine lowered the conscription age from 27 to 25 in an effort to bolster the size of its military.

Ukraine is in need of fresh troops to bolster forces in the south and east, where Russia is pressing forward with its efforts to take ground from outnumbered and outgunned troops.

The U.S. is sending $61 billion in new U.S. military aid, a lifeline for Kyiv’s armed forces.

U.S. officials also confirmed Wednesday that the United States last month secretly sent Ukraine a number of long-range missiles that Kyiv has urgently sought so that its forces can hit Russian forces well behind the front lines.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said “the key now is speed” in getting the supplies into place. Ukrainian forces have run desperately short of artillery ammunition and air defense missiles. That has allowed the Kremlin’s forces to inch forward in parts of eastern Ukraine in what has largely become a war of attrition.